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The Battle Against Climate Change by Paul Kingsnorth

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Humanity has lost the battle against climate change. That is what Paul Kingsnorth thinks. The former environmental activist believes that we can’t stop climate change anymore. How should we live on knowing that climate change is a fact that can’t be denied anymore? A documentary that gives thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth the time to explain how humanity still can be hopeful although the battle against climate change in his eyes has been lost.

Former environmental activist and writer Paul Kingsnorth has withdrawn to Ireland on a unspoilt part of the earth. You could say that he lives now at the end of the world. A portrait of an end-time thinker who nevertheless does not give up hope and continues to believe in the power of nature.

Thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth stood early on the barricades as a conservationist. He resisted the insatiable hunger of the globalized world for more land, resources and things in England and on the other side of the world in Papa New Guinea. Kingsnorth was one of the leaders of the environmental movement and reached a large international audience with its passionate speeches. But at some point, he came to terms that he had to revisit his belief that humanity could save the world.

In his bundled essays “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist” (2017) he describes how some weak-kneed accountants of this world hollowed out the green movement from the inside and exchanged the barricades for ties and conference tables. Limiting CO2 emissions became the new gospel because it was measurable and countable. But according to Kingsnorth, that is an illusion. He thinks that in his victory rush, the green movement of today exchanges the remaining wild nature for a wind or solar panel farm. The battle is lost.

Kingsnorth withdrew with his family to the Irish countryside to live self-sufficient. He founded the “Dark Mountain Project” in which writers, poets and artists are looking for a different view of the end of the world, based on the connection between man and nature. He exchanged his clenched fist and protesting voice for an inner, literary search for the question of what makes us human and what our place is on this magical planet.

Original titel: De aarde draait door
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2018. © VPRO Backlight December 2018.

Cumulative Exposure to Climate Change for RCP 8.5 (Business as Usual)

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The broad threat to humanity from ongoing greenhouse gas emissions
Summary: Ongoing greenhouse gas emissions are simultaneously shifting many elements of Earth’s climate beyond thresholds that can impact humanity. By affecting the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation, man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the Earth’s energy budget ultimately leading to warming . Given interconnected physics, warming can affect other aspects of the Earth’s climate system. For instance, by enhancing water evaporation and increasing the air’s capacity to hold moisture, warming can lead to i) extreme precipitation, also increasing risk of floods, in commonly wet places or ii) drought in commonly dry places, also increasing risk of wildfires, and heatwaves when heat transfer from water evaporation ceases. In the oceans, CO2 interacts with water to produce carbonic acid leading to ocean acidification whereas warming of water molecules increases the volume they occupy adding to the sea-level rise from melting land ice. Ocean warming can also supply moisture increasing the strength of storms. In an extensive literature review, we found traceable evidence for 467 pathways in which human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea level rise, and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. By 2100, on average, the world’s population will be exposed concurrently to the equivalent of the largest magnitude in one of these hazards if greenhouse gasses are aggressively reduced or three if they are not; some tropical coastal areas will be exposed to the largest changes in up to six hazards concurrently. These findings highlight that greenhouse gas emissions pose a broad threat to humanity by simultaneously intensifying many hazards, which humanity is vulnerable to.

Map description: This web app shows the cumulative index of 11 climate hazards: warming, drought, heatwaves, fires, precipitation, floods, storms, water scarcity, sea level rise, and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. All climate hazards were scaled between zero and the 95th percentile change projected in the given hazard globally by 2095 under RCP 8.5 (worst case scenario); In other words, a pixel with a value of zero in a given hazards suggests that that hazard will not change in that pixel. In turn, a pixel with a value of 1 suggests that the most extreme increase of that hazard anywhere in the world will occur in that pixel. This standardization allowed for the summation of changes in all hazards at a given pixel to generate a cumulative index of climate change shown in this web app globally under three alternative scenarios.

Journal: Nature Climate Change

Authors: Camilo Mora, Daniele Spirandelli, Erik Franklin, Michael Kantar, John Lynham, Wendy Miles, Charlotte Smith, Kelle Freel, Jade Moy, Leo Louis, Evan Barba, Keith Bettinger, Abby Frazier, John Colburn IX, Naota Hanasaki, Ed Hawkins, Yukiko Hirabayashi, Wolfgang Knorr, Christopher Little, Kerry Emanuel, Justin Sheffield, Jonathan Patz, Cynthia Hunter.